How to vertically center a container in Bootstrap?

Question

I'm looking for a way to vertically center the container div inside the jumbotron and to set it in the middle of the page.

The .jumbotron has to be adapted to the full height and width of the screen. The .container div has a width of 1025px and should be in the middle of the page (vertically center).

I want this page to have the jumbotron adapted to the height and width of the screen along with the container vertically center to the jumbotron. How can I achieve it?

Answer 1

The Flexible box way

Vertical alignment is now very simple by the use of Flexible box layout. Nowadays, this method is supported in a wide range of web browsers except Internet Explorer 8 & 9. Therefore we'd need to use some hacks/polyfills or different approaches for IE8/9.

In the following I'll show you how to do that in only 3 lines of text (regardless of old flexbox syntax).

Note: it's better to use an additional class instead of altering .jumbotron to achieve the vertical alignment. I'd use vertical-center class name for instance.

Example Here (A Mirror on jsbin).

<div class="jumbotron vertical-center"> <!-- 
                      ^--- Added class  -->
  <div class="container">
    ...
  </div>
</div>

.vertical-center {
  min-height: 100%;  /* Fallback for browsers do NOT support vh unit */
  min-height: 100vh; /* These two lines are counted as one :-)       */

  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
}

Important notes (Considered in the demo):

1. A percentage values of height or min-height properties is relative to the height of the parent element, therefore you should specify the height of the parent explicitly.

2. Vendor prefixed / old flexbox syntax omitted in the posted snippet due to brevity, but exist in the online example.

3. In some of old web browsers such as Firefox 9 ^{(in which I've tested)}, the flex container - .vertical-center in this case - won't take the available space inside the parent, therefore we need to specify the width property like: width: 100%.

4. Also in some of web browsers as mentioned above, the flex item - .container in this case - may not appear at the center horizontally. It seems the applied left/right margin of auto doesn't have any effect on the flex item.
   Therefore we need to align it by box-pack / justify-content.

For further details and/or vertical alignment of columns, you could refer to the topic below:

• vertical-align with Bootstrap 3

---

The traditional way for legacy web browsers

This is the old answer I wrote at the time I answered this question. This method has been discussed here and it's supposed to work in Internet Explorer 8 and 9 as well. I'll explain it in short:

In inline flow, an inline level element can be aligned vertically to the middle by vertical-align: middle declaration. Spec from W3C:

middle
Align the vertical midpoint of the box with the baseline of the parent box plus half the x-height of the parent.

In cases that the parent - .vertical-center element in this case - has an explicit height, by any chance if we could have a child element having the exact same height of the parent, we would be able to move the baseline of the parent to the midpoint of the full-height child and surprisingly make our desired in-flow child - the .container - aligned to the center vertically.

Getting all together

That being said, we could create a full-height element within the .vertical-center by ::before or ::after pseudo elements and also change the default display type of it and the other child, the .container to inline-block.

Then use vertical-align: middle; to align the inline elements vertically.

Here you go:

<div class="jumbotron vertical-center">
  <div class="container">
    ...
  </div>
</div>

.vertical-center {
  height:100%;
  width:100%;

  text-align: center;  /* align the inline(-block) elements horizontally */
  font: 0/0 a;         /* remove the gap between inline(-block) elements */
}

.vertical-center:before {    /* create a full-height inline block pseudo=element */
  content: " ";
  display: inline-block;
  vertical-align: middle;    /* vertical alignment of the inline element */
  height: 100%;
}

.vertical-center > .container {
  max-width: 100%;

  display: inline-block;
  vertical-align: middle;  /* vertical alignment of the inline element */
                           /* reset the font property */
  font: 16px/1 "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
}

WORKING DEMO.

Also, to prevent unexpected issues in extra small screens, you can reset the height of the pseudo-element to auto or 0 or change its display type to none if needed so:

@media (max-width: 768px) {
  .vertical-center:before {
    height: auto;
    /* Or */
    display: none;
  }
}

UPDATED DEMO

And one more thing:

If there are footer/header sections around the container, it's better to position that elements properly (relative, absolute? up to you.) and add a higher z-index value (for assurance) to keep them always on the top of the others.